Tao Ni

The ongoing trend towards miniaturization and increased packaging density has exacerbated the reliability problem of Au-Al heterogeneous metal bonding structures in high-temperature environments, where extreme temperatures and high current pose a serious challenge. In order to address this issue, the present study aims to investigate the electromigration reliability of Au-Al bonding by comparing the conventional heterogeneous contacts with OPM structures, which are homogeneous contacts. A novel bonding layout was developed to precisely detect the resistance and obtain stage changes in electromigration. The experimental results demonstrated that the relative resistance shift of Au-Al bonding at 250 °C was 98.7%, while CrAu and NiPdAu OPM structures exhibited only 46.1% and 2.93% shifts, which suggests that the reliability of OPM structures was improved by a factor of 2.14 and 33.6, respectively. The degradation of Au-Al bonding was attributed to the large cracks observed at the bonding interface and lateral consumption of Al elements. In contrast, OPM structures only exhibited tiny voids and maintained a better bonding state overall, indicating that homogeneous metal contacts have better immunity to electromigration. Furthermore, this study also observed the polarity effect of electromigration and analyzed the impact of NiPdAu thickness on reliability. Overall, this research provides a novel approach and an insightful theoretical reference for addressing the bottleneck of high-temperature electromigration reliability in high-temperature sensor packaging.

In this work, we present new evidence of the physical mechanism behind the generation of low-frequency noise with high interface-trap density by measuring the low-frequency noise magnitudes of partially depleted (PD) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) NMOSFETs as a function of irradiation dose. We measure the DC electrical characteristics of the devices at different irradiation doses and separate the threshold-voltage shifts caused by the oxide-trap charge and interface-trap charge. Moreover, the increased densities of the oxide-trap charge projected to the Si/SiO₂ interface and interface-trap charge are calculated. The results of our experiment suggest that the magnitudes of low-frequency noise do not necessarily increase with the increase in border-trap density. A novel physical explanation for the low-frequency noise in SOI-NMOSFETs with high interface-trap density is proposed. We reveal that the presence of high-density interface traps after irradiation has a repressing effect on the generation of low-frequency noise. Furthermore, the exchange of some carriers between border traps and interface traps can cause a decrease in the magnitude of low-frequency noise when the interface-trap density is high.

In this work, the electrostatic discharge (ESD) characteristics of a pMOS-triggered bidirectional silicon-controlled rectifier (PTBSCR) that was fabricated in a 0.18 μm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) process, is investigated. The multi-snapback phenomenon was observed under the transmission line pulsing (TLP) test system. It was found that gate voltage and inserting shallow trench isolation (STI) can significantly affect the trigger voltage and holding voltage. The underlying physical mechanism related to the multi-snapback phenomenon and the effects of gate voltage on the critical parameters was investigated through the experimental results and the assistance of technology computer-aided design (TCAD) simulations. The adjustments of gate voltage and STI on the critical ESD parameters of the device provide an effective design idea for low-voltage ESD protection in the SOI BCD process.